Coalition politics: double trouble

There is an old political cliche trotted out by loyal foot soldiers who don't want to admit in so many words that their government is in a terrible hole. It takes the form of a lament for the feebleness of the presentation of what might otherwise be a perfectly serviceable policy. But even those who delighted in attacking the hapless junior treasury minister Chloe Smith for incompetence after a Newsnight mauling from Jeremy Paxman, heartless hammer of the incoherent, would struggle to explain exactly why the 3p rise in fuel duty is being deferred until January, and how the £550m in foregone revenue is to be made up, and quite what that means for the coalition's founding purpose of cutting the deficit. Plenty of cheesed-off backbenchers in both parties will have looked at Tuesday's borrowing figures, £3bn higher than for May last year, and wondered why it was all still worthwhile.

Hints of an alliance between anti-reform Tories and Labour backbenchers opposed to this particular set of proposals have been squashed, at least for now – although the gap between the bill's publication and royal assent remains immeasurable. But this is the only event of the past week that feels as if it had made it on to the Downing Street grid through the normal planning processes. Look at the record: from Michael Gove's O-level revival to David Cameron's welfare speech and George Osborne's 11th-hour reversal on fuel duty (after a series of colleagues had been sent out to defend it), the impression at Westminster is of a government firing off with only the most random of intentions. The education secretary revealed his plan to reintroduce two-tier 16-plus exams in the columns of the Daily Mail, apparently without even discussing it with the prime minister, let alone Nick Clegg. The chancellor's announcement on fuel duty was kept from the cabinet and he left his junior ministers without a proper briefing. And the question of how the prime minister chiselled out the time in the packed Number 10 diary to make a major speech on welfare has bemused old Downing Street hands. Indiscipline or disorganisation, this sequence of events does the government no favours.

Of course, coalition is an unfamiliar political form, as much for its participants as the voters. The parties are still feeling their way. In a commentary on progress so far published this week by the Constitution Unit, it scored well on key indicators like trust at the top and capacity to take big decisions. The findings might have been more cautious after the past week. Yet the biggest challenge is party management within the coalition's confines. That's why, historically, coalitions rot from the bottom up. Prospects for this one are the more difficult because the unifying project of an economic turnaround within lifetime is in jeopardy. Analysing the seemingly unconnected announcements of the past few days in this context at least provides a pattern. So, for example, angry Lib Dem reaction to Mr Cameron's second-term welfare proposals on Monday was at least partially mollified by the suggestion that the answer to the question why this speech, now, was that it was red meat for Tory backbenchers that would help to buy off opposition to Lords reform; it was hinted that bringing back two-tier 16-plus exams was really the education secretary beginning to mark out his pitch for a future leadership contest (something Mr Gove's aides strongly reject). And by deferring the increase in fuel duty, George Osborne was not so much playing tactical politics but actually embarking on a discreet process of economic stimulus. Well, maybe. What is clear is that this is only the beginning of a combative period of differentiation between the governing parties that will make the next two years very difficult indeed.

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